Are Non-Consumers The Secret To Your Startup’s Success?

Melinda Vaughn

4 years ago

What are you not consuming right now? Maybe you don’t like yogurt. Maybe you don’t need baby formula. Fair enough. But maybe there are products out there that you’d consider buying if they were just better, cheaper, or more convenient.

If you’re in that last group, you’re just the kind of person entrepreneurs should be keeping in mind when launching a new product or service, says Jesse Lipson in his latest Forbes post. New businesses often analyze the state of the current market to gauge a product’s potential for success, but sometimes it’s the market that your product will create that really matters.

“When we launched ShareFile in late 2005,” Lipson writes, “rather than looking at the market for FTP (file transfer protocol, then the dominant form of file transfer) and considering what portion of that market we could capture, I instead thought about all the people who didn’t use FTP because it was difficult and cumbersome. That was the much bigger market in my opinion, and there were very few accurate measurements of that group of non-consumers.”